“I wanted to have a process that had some feeling of neutrality in it and gave people roles to play. That would give a chance for ideas to be articulated, hard questions asked and deliberated on; some meeting of minds and, conceivably, a solution,” Nesson says.
Nesson said he regrets that the proposal offended some students.
“I feel terrible about the emotional upset I have caused, and deeply regret that I have placed students who were already hurt once in the position of having to deal with yet another occasion for apology. I acted with good intention but without due care,” Nesson told The Crimson after the incident.
Today he faces more student protest.
After a walk to Harkness Commons for a bagel and coffee, Nesson realizes it is 10:55. He runs back to Griswold and sprints up four flights of stairs to his office to get a box of papers to distribute to his students. Someone has already brought the papers to class, so Nesson runs back downstairs and to the Austin Hall classroom.
“Sorry I’m late!” he says to the class, handing five papers from other students to each student. He tells the class to read each paper and rank them on piece of paper, saying that he will then grade the papers and use the exercise to show the difference between what students and professors look for in a paper.
A student gets up and asks Nesson what relevance the ranking will have on the grades of the papers.
Nesson says that he is not sure and leaves the classroom to get more ranking sheets.
Just after he leaves, a student in the front of the class begins a short speech to the rest of the room.
“There’s a story that a professor once asked his class of there were any questions. A student gets up and asks a question. Then another student gets up and asks the exact same question. Soon everyone is raising their hands and asking the same question, and the point is, students have the power to oppose tyrannical professors!” he exclaims.
Soon the room is abuzz, with people standing up and complaining.
“I’m not going to pay money to grade papers, I’m paying money so they can grade papers,” one yells.
“Can you talk about this outside so those of us who are trying to do the assignment can? And could you not make everything into an issue?” one shouts back.
“I think this is a legitimate experiment,” says another.
Students soon get up and walk out of the classroom grumbling about not wanting to do the assignment.
Nesson returns and all of the students who left the room return quietly, sit down and rank the papers.
After the class, one student says that Nesson’s irreverent style and teaching methods could work well, but are too unstructured and don’t relate enough to the material.
“Instead it just seems like a way for Charlie to not grade papers,” she says.
Taking papers from students as they leave, Nesson reflects on his more than 30 years at HLS.
“After I got tenure I took five years of leave and litigated. I really thought about staying in practice” Nesson says, “but there was something in this place. There is a power here, not like the kind of power to beat somebody up with, but the kind of power that excites you about coming here and working.”